Friday, 1 January 2010

2009 was a year of global recession and job losses. But what did we do about it?

Not a lot.

First we blamed individuals rather than the system but then we forgot about even that. Remember Fred Goodwin and his £700,000 a year pension? Probably vaguely. Remember the duck house, Gordon Brown's cleaning bill and the house flipping?

A scandal, admittedly one of fairly epic proportions, paralysed politics and we all forgot about the people who wrecked our economy, filled their pockets and laughed all the way back to the bank.

Like the English weather, fat cat bankers and regular recessions are taken as facts of life, not symptoms of a system that has created a new class of super rich who holiday in Albert Speer inspired pleasure domes in Dubai. So it has always been, we are told, and so it will always be we believe.

However even the English weather is not unchangeable, and thanks to the fiasco of Copenhagen it will be changing quite a lot over the coming years. In year that has seen climate scientists emails hacked, Ian Plimer grace the front cover of The Spectator and the Daily Express print "One Hundred Reasons Climate Change is Natural" on its front page (a list so vacuous even New Scientist could only be bothered to refute the first 50 points.) failure was not a big surprise.

So what of the new decade?

Well, don't expect people to take any of this lying down. There are a lot of angry people leaving college and university with high ideals and no prospect of a decent job. Last time this happened was in the early 90s they took to the trees. Who what they're going to do next - but expect a golden decade for activism.